The Cottage lacks originality

Paul Andrew Williams may polarise fans with this surprisingly unoriginal follow-up to his gritty award-winning debut London To Brighton. In a dramatic about-face, The Cottage starts promisingly as a comedic kidnapping caper then winds up as a psycho-slasher tale.

It’s decidedly a film of two halves â the problem is that neither half works particularly well. It’s not funny enough as a comedy or scary enough as a horror to satisfy fans of either genre.

The story begins with bickering brothers David (Andy Serkis) and Peter (Reece Shearsmith) kidnapping gobby, head-butting gangster’s brat Tracey (Jennifer Ellison) to make some quick cash with the help of her scheming step-brother Andrew (Steven O’Donnell).

The plan goes terribly wrong, however, when Tracey escapes and takes Peter hostage. It’s here that the story starts to fall apart as the pair, pursued by David and Andrew, follow a well-worn clichéd path to a farmhouse in the woods, that (surprise, surprise) is home to an angry, deformed fellow who likes to decorate the place with corpses.

This aspires to be a slapstick splatter flick in the tradition of Evil Dead but it’s just a dead end.